A Family History Story
For some time I have wanted to work on a website to document my family history. Finding Froystad is my first attempt to do so. This is very much a site under construction, and mostly contains the text of a hastily written paper I recently wrote on the subject. My next project will be to add photos and links to the various documents referred to throughout the story.
This is the story of my family history research efforts, which started in March of 2012. I suppose that this is something of a bumbling story. I started with no real experience in genealogical research, and no understainding of my ancestry beyond my grandparents. I knew very little about Norway, and even less about Norwegian farm life or Norwegian history. It is also not merely – or mostly – a listing of names and dates, nor does it really contain any personal anecdotes of the persons identified here. I suspect it may be rather uninteresting reading to anyone who doesn’t have any family interest (and likely too much even for some who do). The only anecdotes are those that can be ascertained or deduced from information available in the various documents – but there are a few interesting stories to be told. There may be some value here to others who are undertaking to do their own Norwegian family research using the Norwegian parish registers and census data, as I have described here. There are likely mistakes included here, and I welcome any corrections anyone may discover. It is also not complete – there are a great many details to be collected. For example, although I was searching diligently for birth records, I was not nearly as concerned to find records of deaths or burials or weddings. My main goal was to trace my ancestors at the Froystad farm as far back as possible. Also, please be aware that as I was writing this, I was reviewing a great many documents I have collected, and the documents tend to spell names differently from each other – which partly explains why I don’t maintain consistency in the spelling of names throughout. I’m warning you now – please don’t be frustrated with how my spelling of same names constantly changes. I wrote the text contained in the site mostly over one weekend, just to get some of this down before I began to forget details. As I look back through it now, I would really like to do a re-write to clean up lots of sentences - but right now that task looks like lots of trouble, so I will probably do bits and pieces here and there over time.
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